Designing your landscape can be one of the most rewarding projects you’ll ever do. It’s also one of the best garden-related things you can do during the long, cold days of winter.

Good gardens don’t just happen; they’re the result of careful planning. As anxious as you’ll be to rush to the garden center, now’s the time to pause and develop a real understanding of your property’s features and how they can be used to create enjoyable outdoor spaces.

Consider doing these steps:

— Base map. A sketch of your yard, showing property lines, the house’s orientation, driveways and paths. Start at the front corner of the house. With a 100-foot tape, measure the distance out to the curb and across to the nearest property line, and draw onto graph paper. A scale of 1 inch equaling 10 feet works well, but pick whatever works for you and stay consistent through the drawing. The larger the grid paper, the easier it will be to write in all your plans and ideas. If you can find it, 18- by 24-inch grid paper is great.

Continue measuring from all corners of the house to the property’s boundaries. Draw an arrow indicating north. Locate doors and windows; gas, electric and cable utilities; trees and shrubs; and any neighbors’ features near the property line that might affect your design, such as large trees, fences or buildings.

— Site analysis. Make a basic inventory of the property’s strengths and weaknesses. A site analysis can be sketched in a single day, but it would be better to record how the area changes throughout the year. Note all significant features like sunny and shady spots, prevailing winds, drainage problems, existing vegetation, good and poor views and all utilities and easements. Make several photocopies of the base map with site analysis notes.

— Preliminary designs. Now use the copies to come up with three or four preliminary designs. Let your imagination run wild with gazebos, vegetable gardens and flowerbeds. For each design draw a bubble diagram roughly indicating the shapes and locations of these features. Exact items and perfect graphics aren’t necessary; just “bubble in” rough ideas.

Do pay attention to your site analysis, however. For example, a vegetable garden needs a flat, open area with lots of sun. Don’t place it under a huge tree. Consider how the elements relate to each other and the house, too. For example, a compost pile should be close to the vegetable garden but out of view. Or a patio shouldn’t get blasting, summer sun without some kind of cover. It’s going to take several tries to fit the odd pieces smoothly into the jigsaw puzzle, but finally a practical plan will emerge.

Look over your preliminary designs and note the features you like from each. Put them all together on a new, more detailed base map while paying attention to that site analysis. It’s critical that the garden’s features all cooperate. Here is where you need accurate dimensions, too. Find the mature spread of that shade tree; measure exactly how long that front walk will be; count the number of shrubs needed for the hedge. You may find you have to make a hybrid of several different ideas to get everything to work together. Above all, consider the mature size of the plants and trees you want to add. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for lots of work and expense later.

When you find your perfect design, draw it on a clean base map. As an option, you can color the different features for easier visual reference, then show it to other gardeners or even a professional landscape designer. A fresh set of eyes is an insurance policy that you haven’t overlooked something that could really cost you later.

— Next, work out a budget. Don’t let money limit your creativity, but be realistic. Actual costs might mean a change in the design. But instead of going back to the drawing board, consider building one part of the plan at a time. Figure what you most want and can do immediately and what can wait until next year. You may find you can have it all — but just not all at once.

Good landscape design isn’t difficult, but it involves a definite process. Planning, patience and looking to the future are characteristics of gardeners, anyway. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can create the landscape of your dreams.

Adapted from an earlier The Gardener Within column. Joe Lamp’l, host of “Growing a Greener World” on PBS, is a master gardener and author. For more information visit www.joegardener.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.

Landscape Designer and Harvard resident Rochelle Greayer has a green thumb when it comes to growing new businesses. Several years ago, Greayer started a blog about landscape design called Studio ‘g’. Her growing list of followers is attracting enough advertisers to supplant her design business.

A year ago, Greayer and her business partner, Susan Cohan, launched an online magazine about landscape design called Leaf Magazine, which has a growing list of followers as well.

Greayer is also one of the founding members of the Harvard Farmer’s Market, which recently completed its sixth and most successful season.

The latest endeavor for the designer and mother of two is the launch of her first design class — to be held in partnership with floral designer Roanne Robbins — in Greayer’s barn on Pinnacle Road.

For more information, visit her web site.

Leaf Magazine just celebrated its one-year anniversary. How did it get started?

My business partner and I knew each other through online networking. We’re both landscape designers. She’s down in New Jersey. We’re both active in online activities related to landscape design, as professionals working in the industry. We’re both bloggers and we’d seen trends of online magazines being able to emerge because the technology made it more simple to create that magazine feeling. And it’s fairly inexpensive technology and we didn’t have any in our area [of landscape design].

What is Leaf Magazine all about?

When I moved here eight years ago from where I lived and worked in England, it was so different coming here, because it’s such a gardening culture over there. There are about eight beautiful magazines [in the U.K.] covering the industry in whichever way you can imagine.

Here we have a couple but they’re small and struggling. We really saw a hole in the market for a practical magazine that was inspiring but in a way that is attainable rather than completely aspirational. Not necessarily being a hard-core gardening magazine, we’re much more about design in the same sense that an interior magazine would be — they’re really lifestyle magazines.

We saw that as a real pull — having a garden and living in a way where you’re eating directly from your garden, you care about environmental issues, you like to be outdoors — you just have this nice lifestyle that extends beyond your front door.

How big is the staff of the magazine?

We have six people who work on the magazine now. My partner, Susan Cohan, and our advertising sales person and our graphic design person all live in the New Jersey. Myself and our copy editor and one of our contributing editors are up here, between Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

A lot of people ask how we manage with everyone working from home in different places. That’s totally not the way most magazines operate. The way we make it work is we use online tools and Skype and chat all the time.

How often does a new issue come out?

Right now we’re at three times a year. That’s what we’re planning for next year. We’re definitely looking for publishing business partners that might help us financing-wise and industry-wise to grow it. Right now we’re growing organically, which is great, but we’d love to maybe speed it up a bit and take on a partner so we can do four or six issues a year.

Tell me about your blog, Studio ‘g’:

It’s might be one of the biggest in the industry about garden design. Blogging seemed like a great way for me to organize myself creatively. It quickly evolved to attract a lot of readers.

About a year and half ago – really it was the same time that I started Leaf – I’ve made it really the only thing I do. I’ve stopped taking on design projects and continuing to grow the blog by adding revenue there and make a living off of that.

You’re starting to offer design classes. What’s that all about?

I have this bigger end game in mind of offering classes in related topics as an extension of the blog and Leaf. The first one features Roanne Robbins, who was a vendor at the Farmer’s Market. She’s a contributor on Leaf as well as a contributor on ‘g’. She and I will be running the class.

I have a barn where I live on Pinnacle Road by Carlson’s, and I’ve always wanted to use the barn to have classes and events there. So we’re running our first class on Nov. 14. You can learn from Roanne how to make beautiful Thanksgiving centerpieces from cuttings from your garden, and cut flowers you might buy at the grocery store.

We’re also trying to focus on going for a walk in the woods and how to gather things and how to use things that you might just see around. To me the reason you would want to come is because it’s a nice place with nice people to hang out for two hours — almost like going to the spa for two hours. It’s almost like spoiling yourself.

 

October 18, 2012_Solana Beach, California_USA_

McCarville admires the variegated colors of Kalanchoe ‘Fantastic,’ a hybrid variety of a succulent commonly called “flapjack” or “paddle” plants. Water-wise succulents are increasingly popular landscape plants.” Hayne Palmour IV • U-T photos

A milk weed plant from South Africa at Cedros Gardens in Solana Beach.

Horticulturist and landscape designer Jason Chen shows the flower of a “Giant Dutchman’s Pipe” vine plant at Cedros Gardens in Solana Beach.

Yellow blooms of the perennial sunflower “Maximilian” frame Cedros Gardens owner Mia McCarville and horticulturist/landscape designer Jason Chen. The flowers are part of the “cottage garden” area of the nursery, which is in the Cedros Design District of Solana Beach. Hayne Palmour IV • U-T

Penny Lingo

Special to the U-T

‘We don’t want to eat three meals at one time, then fast for a week,” said Mia McCarville, owner of Cedros Gardens in Solana Beach. “Plants are the same.”

Slow-release fertilizers, like most organics, she said, feed the plant with a steady stream of nutrients instead of a big gulp. “We try to use organic.”

Organic gardening is just one of the earth-friendly practices championed by McCarville and horticulturalist Jason Chen, the garden’s resident landscape designer.

Healthy soil is filled with microbes, essential for supporting plant life. “Chemical fertilizer is very easy to use, and it produces instant results,” said McCarville. But the high levels of chemicals kill the microbes and thus the soil, and then seep into the groundwater. “That will end up in the lagoon and then in the ocean.”

“And then it ends up (back) here,” Chen added. “It’s a big circle.”

McCarville’s experience with growing plants began in her early childhood when she helped her parents in their garden in Japan.

Her advocacy for the use of organic materials and water-saving practices has grown steadily in the past two decades, since she moved up from a smaller nursery to open her current business in 1993.

Though she said she is “is pretty much self-taught,” the knowledge she has acquired over the years enables her to offer her customers sound advice on plants and garden procedures, and consultations on design.

Chen, who holds a degree in ornamental horticultural design from North Carolina State University, came on board about two years ago. He estimated that design work is about 40 percent to 50 percent of their business. He’s learning a lot, he said, from working with McCarville.

The two agree that every plan must be tailored to the wants and needs of the client; at the same time, consideration must be given to conditions such as soil type, and the size and orientation of the space. “We have to know how the plants develop in the garden, how they’ll look year-round, before we can put it in the design,” McCarville said. “Sometimes we have to tell (clients) what they don’t want to hear.”

Both Chen and McCarville are enthusiastic about using edible plants in landscape design.

Chen cites citrus as an example of greenery with benefits: “It’s beautiful, it’s evergreen, and you can sometimes get fruit year-round.” Some hybrids grow well on the coast: Cara Cara pink navel oranges (Citrus sinensis ‘Cara Cara’), Valencias and all the Mandarin varieties.

For smaller spaces, options include planting one of the dwarf varieties or training a plant against a trellis on a flat plane, known as espalier. “We’ve had a couple clients that want to espalier,” Chen said. The spare, regimented look can complement a contemporary architectural design.

“Something new to this area is cherry trees,” McCarville said. “There are two varieties, and you have to plant both for pollination, but they both have wonderful fruit. Royal Lee (Prunus avium ‘Royal Lee’), and its companion pollinator Minnie Royal (Prunus avium ‘Minnie Royal’) have medium-large cherries similar to Bings in flavor. They are adapted to milder climates with moderate summers and winters that provide at least 200 hours below 45 degrees – less than half the chill needed for traditional cherries.